Exploratory Data Analysis

Data

The original data is stored in the file lxb-wz2c-m46p (1).xlsx. After excluding the first 100 rows, a random sample of 100 entries was selected from the remaining data with seed 2025. Based on the human brain and ground truth, a summary of text comment of original data was extracted, recorded in total 13 features Document.ID, Tone, Tone_justify, Tone_quote, Commenter_Role, Specialty, Patient_cost, Patient_quality, Provider_pay, Provider_quality, Other, Justification, Quote, Role_category into a CSV file named fill_sample.csv. it contains 13 discrete variables and 100 rows, totaling 1,300 cells. Among them, 18.1% of the cells are empty,meaning no useful information could be extracted.

Missing value

• Column-wise Missingness:
  The Commenter_Role column has a missing rate of 40%, suggesting limited role identity information.
  The Specialty column, which reflects sub-identity of corresponding commenter’s role , is missing in 80% of entries.
  The Other column, which captures other extractable information from comments, has a 74% missing rate.
  I recommend paying close attention to the Specialty and Other columns, as their high missingness may affect the robustness of downstream analyses, depending on the study context.

• Row-wise Missingness:
  the 4 rows with the most missing values share one common trait: their tone is classified as “very negative”.
  the 4 rows with the full information (Rows 15, 37, 69, and 83) share one common trait: their roles are tend to not be non-professional roles, e.g.patient, suggesting that professional identity may correlate with more complete information.

Tone and Tone_justify Description & Exploration

• Description:
  The tone of a comment is categorized as very_negative, negative, neutral, or positive. The tone_justify provides the reasoning behind this classification based on linguistic metrics. These include negative_word (presence of words with negative connotation like not, destroy), strong_word (forceful terms like must, stop), imperative (use of imperative sentences), capitalization (use of capitalization for emphasis), punctuation (presence of punctuation mark such as ! or ?), implicature (present of indirect expression or implied negativity ), objective (whether is fact-based), and supportive (whether the comment expresses encouragement or approval). high_frequency (it measures how often these features occur within the comment, either by calculating the proportion of sentences containing such features or noting repeated use of the same indicator).

• Tone Distribution:
  “Percentage of Each Category in Tone” pie chart shows Negative and very negative tones have roughly equal proportions (43% and 45%, respectively). In contrast, neutral and positive tones are much less common (7% neutral, 1% positive). This indicates that the majority of people in the sample express a negative attitude toward PE.

• Correlation between Tone and Tone_justify:
  According to the chi-square test \(p<0.05\), Tone-justify is statistically significant associated with Tone, showing the tone_justify we defined is reasonable. Heatmap which based on scaled Contingency table, shows the proportion for each Tone_justidy in the Tone. It could be explored vertically and horizontally, combined with pie charts.

• Vertically:
  In the negative tone category, the negative_word metric is the most dominant, while capitalization, implicature, strong_word, objective, and supportive appear least frequently.
  In the very negative tone, punctuation and capitalization contribute the most.
  In neutral and positive tones, only objective and supportive appear, respectively, as the sole contributing metrics.
  

• Horizontally :
  In negative_word, negative tone contributed most, followed by very negative.
  In strong_word, high_frequency, capitalization, and implicature, very negative tone contributed most.
  In neutral and positive tones, only objective and supportive appear, respectively, as the sole contributing metrics.
  In imperative, negative tone contributes most.
  In punctuation, negative tone contributes most.
  

Commenter Roles Explanation and Exploration

• Description
  Based on whether the commenter role is directly affected by PE, I categorized roles into three groups: "patient", "provider", and "other".For example, pharmacists and providers are grouped together under the provider category, while organization and attorney roles are grouped under other.The “patient” and “provider” groups are directly affected by PE through their involvement in the healthcare delivery chain. In contrast, the “other” group is indirectly affected by PE via institutional, legal, or organizational influences.

• Role and corresponding specialties
  The table “Commenter Role with Specialties” summarizes all role names along with their corresponding specialty names. In the specialties column, missing or unavailable information is represented by a “–”. For example, the role nurse in our data corresponds to specialties including both “NA” and “register,” where “NA” indicates that the specialty information could not be directly extracted or inferred from the text.

• Distribution of General Role
  "Distribution of General Role"pie chart shows the proportion of the three groups: patient, provider, and other. The null category represents missing or unavailable role information.

• Distribution of Commenter_Role within the most common general role groups
  "Distribution of Commenter Roles in General Role: xxxx" pie charts display the distribution of Commenter_Role within the top 1 general role groups.

• Distribution of Specialty Within the Most Common Commenter Role in the Most Common General Role Category
  "Top xxxx Commenter Roles: Distribution of Specialty" bar charts illustrate how specialties are distributed within a top n Commenter_Role in a given top 1 general role category.

Commenter Role with Specialties
Commenter_Role	Specialties
anesthesiologist	-
attorney	-
caregiver	-
cilvil_servant	-
nurse	register, -
organization	ngo, coalition, labor_union
patient	-, millitary veteran, kidney transplant recipient
pharmacist	-, retired
physician	emergency, rheumatology, -, terminated
provider	-, emergency
psychotherapist	emergency, -, terminated

[1] “physician” “nurse” “provider” “pharmacist”
[5] “psychotherapist”

Examples of Comments with Hard-to-Identify Commenter Roles

These comments lack clear identifying information, making it difficult to classify the commenter roles. So, most of them are labeled as NA in Commenter_role

• FTC-2024-0022-1916: Cannot determine the commenter role; role inference is difficult
  Comment:
  > As someone who lived in Europe for 5 years, I can say for certain that the US has the best health care and the most highly trained doctors in the world. I moved back to the US specifically because I needed better healthcare than I could find anywhere in Europe. Why would we want to degrade that so that a tiny minority of people can reap huge profits?? I am glad to see the government recognize the problems presented by consolidation in health care industries, particularly emergency rooms. Private equity firms often prioritize profits over patient care and worker safety, leading to higher costs, reduced quality of service, and increased risks for both patients and healthcare workers. I urge you to consider implementing policies that would limit or restrict the ability of private equity firms to acquire and operate emergency rooms. This could include stricter regulations on mergers and acquisitions in the healthcare industry, as well as greater transparency and accountability requirements for these firms. Thank you.

• FTC-2024-0022-0245: Cannot determine the commenter role at all; text too short
  Comment:
  > Private equity has no business to be involved in the Medical Professions.

• FTC-2024-0022-1320: Commenter role unclear, but “MD” appears in the name
  Comment:
  > It is unthinkable that the insurance company could own the hospital or practice, thus, employing the doctors that they already stranglehold with insurance denials. This is the definition of a nefarious monopoly!

• FTC-2024-0022-2091: Commenter role uncertain; possibly nurse (mentions nursing)
  Comment:
  > Private Equity firms, large insurance companies have made working in healthcare extremely unfulfilling with constant pressures to meet unattainable patient volumes and constant cutting of staff and services with expectation. Current employees will continue to do more. Nursing is no longer about taking care of patients, but rather being able to check enough boxes on a computer screen. Large insurance companies that have constant denials on medication that are FDA approved for their condition make it difficult to care for patients in a manner that follows standards of care.

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Exploration of Correlation Between Commenter Role and Tone

Association Between Commenter Role and Tone

• Chi-square test indicates that Commenter_Role is statistically significantly associated with the Tone of the comment (\(p<0.05\)).

• The Contingency Table Heatmap shows counts for each combination of Role ("patient", "provider", "other", "no information") and Tone category ("negative", "very negative", "neutral", "positive").

Distribution of Tone per Role Category

The histogram showing the distribution of tone within each role category reveals the following:

• For commenters with no information on Role, contributions are relatively highest in the negative and very negative tones. Combining this with the longitudinal interpretation—that those directly experiencing PE tend to show negative or very negative tones—this suggests that many commenters without role information may actually belong to the patient or provider groups if forced to classify within patient, provider, or other.

• For providers and patients, both groups are contributed more by negative or very negative tones compared to neutral or positive tones. Moreover, providers are contributed by more to the negative tone than the very negative tone compared to patients. This may be due to providers’ professional training and occupational discipline, which help them better regulate emotional expression when describing issues.

• For Other, contribution from positive tone is the least, while contributions from negative, very negative, and neutral tones show no marked imbalance. This suggests that people who do not directly experience PE tend not to hold supportive attitudes toward PE, indicating that PE’s impact is broad and its societal effect is primarily negative.

Exploration of comment’s length

word_count features the comment text length. For the comments recorded in the attached files, I count the words manually. For the comments recorded in the original data cell, I count the words through function str_count() in R.

• Overall Summary of Word_count “Overall Summary Word Count” table and histogram show the overall distribution of word_count. It is obvious a long right-tail distribution, suggesting the further statistics test would be used should not the test that based on the normal distribution

• Summary of Word_count by Tone: Kruskal-Wallis H test (non-parametric) shows us the there are significant differences in the distribution of word_count among different Tone groups; From the “Summary Word Count by Tone” table, the very negative tone’s comment is systematically shorter than the negative tone’s, but this different is not statistically significant; the difference between neutral tone’s word_count and negative tone’s word_cound is statistically significant; the difference between neutral tone’s word_count and very negative tone’s word_cound is statistically significant

• Summary of Word_count by Role_category: Kruskal-Wallis H test and “Summary Word Count by Role_category” table tell us there is no statistically significant difference of word_count by Role_category

• Summary of Word_count by concern level: To explore whether comment length varies across different aspects of concern, I constructed a new variable, Concern_Level, based on four binary indicators: Patient_cost, Patient_quality, Provider_pay, and Provider_quality. I calculated the row-wise sum of these four variables for each comment, resulting in a score ranging from 0 to 4, labeled as "No Concern" (0), "Low" (1), "Medium" (2), "High" (3), and "Highest" (4), interpreted as a measure of “concern breadth”. To assess whether comment length differs significantly across these concern levels, I first conducted group-wise descriptive statistics of word_count(“Summary of Word Count by Concern Level” table), followed by a Kruskal–Wallis test to detect any overall differences. Since the Kruskal–Wallis test is significant (\(p<0.05\)), I applied Dunn’s post hoc pairwise comparisons with Bonferroni correction to identify which specific levels differed significantly in comment length. it shows that having Low, Medium, and High levels of concern were all significantly longer than those with No Concern (p < 0.05 for all three comparisons).

Overall Summary Word Count
count	missing	min	q1	median	mean	q3	max	sd
100	0	1	46.25	125.5	333.41	226.25	6297	806.8054

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Summary Word Count by Tone
Tone	count	min	q1	median	mean	q3	max	sd
negative	44	1	77.25	142	387.7727	271.75	6297	1002.44962
neutral	8	3	3.00	12	37.8750	21.25	227	76.89592
positve	1	3	3.00	3	3.0000	3.00	3	NA
very_negative	47	3	68.00	130	339.8511	173.50	3724	663.49463

Kruskal-Wallis Test for Word Count by Tone
Statistic	Df	P_value
13.693	3	0.003354

Dunn's Test for Word Count by Tone
Comparison	Z	P.unadj	P.adj
negative - neutral	3.3397435	0.000838558	0.005031
negative - positve	1.7401757	0.081828165	0.490969
neutral - positve	0.4489645	0.653457281	1.000000
negative - very_negative	0.7190723	0.472096352	1.000000
neutral - very_negative	-2.9618691	0.003057778	0.018347
positve - very_negative	-1.5921502	0.111350954	0.668106

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Summary Word Count by Role_category
Role_category	count	min	q1	median	mean	q3	max	sd
other	12	1	3.0	62.0	257.6667	238.00	1741	497.5126
patient	20	3	138.5	178.5	258.7000	264.25	1199	262.9307
provider	29	3	84.0	126.0	307.7931	294.00	2720	516.0690
NA	39	3	31.5	78.0	414.0769	132.50	6297	1175.3598

Kruskal-Wallis Test for Word Count by Role_category
Statistic	Df	P_value
3.658	2	0.1606

Dunn's Test for Word Count by Role_category
Comparison	Z	P.unadj	P.adj
other - patient	-1.9095797	0.05618735	0.1686
other - provider	-1.1887238	0.23454838	0.7036
patient - provider	0.9951801	0.31964867	0.9589

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Summary of Word Count by Concern Level
Concern_Level	count	min	q1	median	mean	q3	max	sd
No Concern	9	3	5.00	13.0	21.11111	25.00	61	20.43554
Low	19	19	57.50	118.0	382.05263	153.50	3724	894.03781
Medium	40	3	72.75	131.0	402.80000	259.50	6297	1053.41528
High	22	66	121.00	155.5	364.81818	358.50	1805	476.34298
Highest	10	1	3.00	53.5	175.40000	196.75	756	262.97917

Kruskal-Wallis Test for Word Count by Concern_Level
Statistic	Df	P_value
21.393	4	0.0002646

Dunn's Test for Word Count by Concern_Level
Comparison	Z	P.unadj	P.adj
High - Highest	2.4292043	0.0151320013	0.1513200
High - Low	1.6348864	0.1020728561	1.0000000
Highest - Low	-1.0608067	0.2887777588	1.0000000
High - Medium	1.2417371	0.2143335735	1.0000000
Highest - Medium	-1.6881877	0.0913752034	0.9137520
Low - Medium	-0.6547435	0.5126328864	1.0000000
High - No Concern	4.2979731	0.0000172367	0.0001724
Highest - No Concern	1.6849391	0.0920003204	0.9200032
Low - No Concern	2.9373759	0.0033100264	0.0331003
Medium - No Concern	3.7162380	0.0002022111	0.0020221

write.csv(df,"100_entries_sample.csv")